____________________________________________ 14 IICC Perspectives with its advanced systems. Defense by its very nature leads to familiarization in units dealing with routine security, and therefore to a natural decrease in vigilance and preparedness. In our understanding, on both occasions, concealment was greater and infinitely more influential than was deception. On both occasions, the enemy did not hide its intentions and methods from IDF surveillance, its deception was focused on hiding the D-day and H-hour of the operation. The failure of intelligence-operation connection: as mentioned, the routine achievements of intelligence led to the illusion that the intelligence services "knew everything", an illusion prevalent not only among the intelligence personnel and the political decision-makers, but also among the IDF's heads and its operational elements. Thus, over the years, the operational command probably concluded that it could indulge itself and act only when there was an alert from intelligence. For the army, it was convenient and low-cost, making military training and routine security possible as long as there was no warning. However, again and again it was forgotten that intelligence does not always bring warnings, and military preparation is obliged to deal with situations in which they are absent. One more aspect is that in both surprises, not only did intelligence influence the operational level, it was vice versa as well, as a boomerang: the intelligence bodies were influenced by the operational elements' self-satisfaction, who overestimated the intelligence bodies themselves… that, in a vicious cycle, led to an increased smugness, and probably blinded their eyes to the intelligence assessment misperception. One final point: in our assessment, the problem lies not only in the fact that "by chance," both in 1973 and in 2023, the human composition of the leadership was the main cause of the intelligence failure. In our opinion, it is not out of the question that a different leadership would also have brought similar results… In conclusion, we have tried to argue that the surprises of 1973 and 2023 characterized long-standing structural and cultural failures, which were forcefully exposed at both ends of a 50-year spectrum. It is important to emphasize that aside from multiple successes, there have been other intelligence failures over the years, even if their results were not as disastrous as in 1973 and 2023. However, those two were, in the end, the most significant concrete tests of the intelligence community, and both times it failed.
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